Wednesday, May 9, 2018

The Ph.D. Mill

First, many
schools are basically degree mills, cranking out diplomas in exchange for those
sweet student loan checks. The students learned nothing in their degree
programs, so when they graduate, they can’t find a job.We’ve been doing this for years, and it’s
created many victims. Many of these get double-victimized, as they return to
school to get doctorates, getting even further in debt. But since now we have
doctorates being cranked out in huge abundance, their value has also plummeted
to almost nothing, in most fields (and, yes, that includes STEM). The more I
cover this huge scandal in higher ed, the more likely it is I’ll prevent at
least a few people from being double-victimized.

While the first
reason above is honorable enough, the second reason I keep coming back to the
Ph.D. glut concerns me more because it deals with integrity. See, your typical
bachelor’s degree was never about a job, and was never meant to directly apply
for a job. A degree in Sociology, Psychiatry, even pure Mathematics is not, all
by itself, necessary to get a job. In these “olden days” simply earning a
degree was an achievement and nothing more, noteworthy enough that an employer
realized the earner was an exceptional person and likely would do well at any
job. The exact field was unimportant.

But that’s the
bachelor’s degree. A Ph.D. is a different matter entirely. Such a degree is a
scholarly research degree, a demonstration that the holder is qualified to
conduct legitimate research (again, I’m referencing the old days here). Absolutely
there were independently wealthy people who would get such degrees and research
on their own time, but those days are mostly over. While common enough over a
century ago (where the aristocracy was more common), somewhere in the 19th
century it was clear that the people getting Ph.D.s were devoting their lives
to knowledge, and would generally need, if not aristocrats themselves, support
from a wealthy sponsor. This support soon shifted over to support from a university
or other institution dedicated to knowledge.

What I’m
getting at here is while bachelor’s degrees are seldom explicitly for a
particular job, doctorate degrees are, specifically, for getting a job in
higher education. Thus comes the integrity: for a university to accept doctoral
students far in excess of any estimates of job availability is a woeful lack of
integrity.

Integrity is
important here, because every accredited school promises in writing to act with
integrity. Few, if any, do, because those student loan checks at the graduate
school level are very sweet indeed.

We’re now starting
to regularly see the problem at the Ph.D. level which we started to see a
decade ago with our students getting bachelor’s degrees. This is no surprise,
since it can take about a decade for a student to get a Ph.D. The Ph.D. mills
are destroying the value of a Ph.D. as assuredly as our degree mills have
destroyed the value of an undergraduate degree:

I’m quoting from Anonymous Academics again
here, because I also think it’s important to understand faculty, when trying to
point out serious problems in higher education today, are punished severely,
and thispunishment is so common that
you can literally publish a regular column from faculty willing to highlight
problems…provided they can preserve their anonymity.

Her article added to an expanding genre known
as quit lit, which
reflects the growing disillusionment of many academics with university culture.

Just as we a huge
body of literature of anonymous academics too afraid of retaliation to openly
criticize higher ed, so too do we now have a great deal of literature which
covers academics who write of their thoughts regarding walking away from the
entire exploitative system. The article I’m quoting from is just one more such
piece.

The author has
her prized Ph.D. but can’t find a job:

Perusing
job ads, it strikes me that lectureship vacancies are rare, in contrast to the
plethora of positions for university bureaucrats. When permanent jobs come up,
the ensuing feeding frenzy sees hundreds of applications from superbly
qualified candidates.

I used to be on
hiring committees, and it is amazing when a job opens up. Even though the job
requirements were very restrictive, we’d still get many hundreds of applicants
who, on paper, were every bit as qualified for the job as I was. Even after
moving the females and minorities to the top of the stack (because that’s what
admin wanted), it was still a daunting task to get to the top five worth
interviewing by the committee.

Senior academics warned that my university
cared more about cheap labour than launching academic careers. It turns out
they were right

The “cheap
labour” (if you’ll forgive the British spelling; the article is just as valid
for the US) refers to being used as a grad student. While adjuncts --churned out
Ph.D.s desperate for work--form the bulk of labor (cheaply) for higher ed,
another significant source is the grad students, who also teach courses and
perform research.

As a third
bonus, grad students also bring in that sweet tuition revenue. It’s no wonder
integrity was discarded in exchange for a bunch of grad students to exploit.

…the aspirations of doctoral students – the
overwhelming majority of PhD students I’ve encountered desperately want a
career in academia. They didn’t saddle themselves with debt because they wanted
intellectual stimulation. Given university marketing departments’ desperate
trumpeting of the value of “employability”, it’s surprising that taught and
research postgraduate degrees seem exempt from this consideration.

Again, integrity
is an issue here. Any claim that employability will happen via a doctorate is
implicit is disintegrated when the university marketing explicitly states that’s
what the Ph.D. is for. Now, when a university is stamping out, say, Plumbing
degrees, they can defend themselves from their graduates not getting jobs by
saying claiming the university has no control over the plumbing industry.

But higher education
totally controls the jobs for Ph.D.s. They know how many positions were
available last year, are available this year, and have an excellent idea how
many will be available in the years to come. Universities are stamping out
degrees for jobs they know for an absolute fact won’t exist because they are the industry.

Our universities know they are hurting people, setting
them up for a financial ruin, and our universities keep on doing it.

I’ve had a year as an academic, for which I’m
grateful. I’ve got a nameplate on my door (which I intend to take with me when
I leave). Do I feel like a failure? No, I did everything I reasonably could to
make myself employable. But I can see that the PhD production line is broken,
and it won’t be fixed any time soon.

So another
scholar walks away from higher education, another victim created. And so I post
again, in the hopes that more people will become informed, and thereby fewer
victims will be created.

But I still
believe our universities need to be taken to task for the pure evil they are
doing here and forced to renounce their evil actions, because they’ll never
stop doing it on their own.